Now, the rest of the defense was also comical for a Premiership team. Mertesacker didn't have a good game but he works hard and still plays with confidence and calmness. He just needs to get used to the speed of the English game. Santos didn't look great. Was way behind the line for the Yakubu equalizer. But he also hasn't played much lately and even more, he hasn't play for Arsenal at all. So i am going to give him at least half an year before i create an opinion about him. He looks skilled and probably will turn out to be a good option on the left. Sagna was the only one who had a clue what was going on in the back but got injured. Djourou has been playing shitty as a central back, imagine as a right back! He got abused a few times by Hoillet but he tried hard and i give him credit for that. The problem is that he is also not good enough, unless he improves tremendously.
Wow, i finally have something positive to say about our attacking game! Saturday was the first time this season, where we looked really dangerous going forward. (Everybody relax, i am talking first half only). Maybe the fact that Blackburn's defense is not the greatest helped us a bit, but both goals that we scored in the first half were after some great passing moves. We also missed at least 3 or 4 good chances to score more. Especially the chance at the end of the half where Gervihno should have passed the ball to Van Persie and we would have been up 3-1 for sure. Instead he opted to shoot and fucked it up.
Now i have to mention two people that i regularly bash on here: 1) Sagna made two good crosses in the first half!!! One high and one low which Gervihno blew. But i give Sagna props when they are due, it's not every day when he can actually execute some dangerous crosses. 2)Arshavin's first half performance finally reminded me of how he can play, today was his best performance in quite a while.
Arteta looked great in the first half, was very active and made some terrific passes. And then in the second half he just disappeared. I don't know if he got tired but i expected much more from him in the second half than what he showed. Gervihno had a really good game and a really bad game at the same time. Really good, because he scored a great goal; he was very active on the wing and overall played a good game. Really bad because if he had made a few good passes instead of shooting the ball we could have been up 4-1 by half time and then no matter how shitty our defense is i think the game would have ended with a different scoreline. I would have liked to see Benayoun in the game at some point because i think he can give us some sharpness up front. Chamakh scored a good goal, he needs to do that more often :).
The crazy part about this whole game is, that even with our horrific defending we could have easily equalized at the end if Mertesacker or Walcott had taken their chances. I really hope that we are going to get it together defensively and start playing decent football. Imagine how little faith i have in our defensive abilities if i picked Vorn instead of Szczechny for my fantasy team. And unfortunately i was right. My brother in law said it best while giving me shit about our game the other night: right now our team talk about defense should be: "Guys, this is our goal and over there is their goal. We have to score in their goal, not ours. Got it?" Sadly this sounds like a pretty good advice.
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